Books: Lord, Hold My Hand

Go TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (303 pp.) —James Baldwin—Knopf ($3.50).

This was one place in sinful Harlem where God was in command: “The saints, arriving, had rented this abandoned store and taken out the fixtures; had painted the walls and built a pulpit, moved in a piano and camp chairs, and bought the biggest Bible they could find. They put white curtains in the show window, and painted across this window, TEMPLE OF THE FIRE BAPTIZED. Then they were ready to do the Lord’s work.”

No member of the storefront church labored harder than Deacon Grimes. In the South he had tomcatted and boozed around until one day, at 21, he had seen the light. Now, a big, morose factory worker, he thundered God’s word at his wife & children without cease. What he would not admit was that he served the Lord only by his words. He could never forgive his wife Elizabeth for having borne an illegitimate child before their marriage. And he hated the child, John, in a most un-Christian way, though the boy desperately wanted his affection.

Fourteen-year-old John is the hero of Go Tell It on the Mountain, a first novel by a 28-year-old Negro who sometimes writes with the powerful rocking rhythms of a storefront-church meeting. Author James Baldwin’s own father was a Harlem clergyman, and the church scenes in go Tell It are as compelling as anything that has turned up in a U.S. novel this year. Watch Preacher Elisha: “At one moment, head thrown back, eyes closed, sweat standing on his brow, he sat at the piano, singing and playing; and then, like a great black cat in trouble in the jungle, he stiffened and trembled, and cried out. Jesus, Jesus, oh Lord Jesus! He struck on the piano one last, wild note and threw up his hands, palms upward, stretched wide apart. The tambourines raced to fill the vacuum left by his silent piano, and his cry drew answering cries. Then he was on his feet, turning, blind, his face congested, contorted with this rage, and the muscles leaping and swelling in his long, dark neck . . . and he began to dance.”

Near the end of Go Tell It, Johnny, too, is saved, in a scene so intense that God’s presence seems to live on the page. But before that, the secret sufferings of a dozen people have been relentlessly exposed, and the sufferings of Baldwin’s race have brought forth the harsh resentments of author and characters alike. Baldwin, for so good a writer, allows himself the luxury of a silly statement: “I wanted my people to be people first, Negroes almost incidentally.” People they certainly are, but so movingly and intensely Negro that any reader listening to them with the .compassion Baldwin evokes will overlook his cliche.